What is Landscape? | Italy 2019

'What is Landscape?' is on show at Galleria Ceribelli, Bergamo Italy from 18 May to 6 July 2019.Catalogue available with text by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben.

Luke Elwes’ paintings do not paint the river, but are made of the river. Their form is that of the contingent, of the point of indiscernibility between what simply is and the one (here, the painter) for whom it is. What interests Elwes is the recording of the moment in which something emerges and immediately sinks into the past, “the shifting patterns on the water, the fall of light on a given day, and the incidental life that passes across one’s visual field. Beneath all this, there is also the delicate registering of material erasures, the disappearances and the brief resurgences, the momentary recollection of this place’s silent past”. The Ganges River series, in particular, captures a landscape that “not only continues to escape, but transgresses and confuses the sacred and the profane, the everyday and the unheard of, the mythical and the real.”

Giorgio Agamben, extract from What is Landscape?, 2019